Getting Off The Bench

I have a few memories of Melinda that I wanted to share.

I hope I never forget the Christmas that she organized our life groups to adopt a family for Christmas. She took the time to call the parents and find out about the needs and wants/interests of the kids. Then she talked with each life group family and assigned us a family member to buy Christmas gifts for. We all got an extra state tax refund that year and we committed to using that money for this family's Christmas. Chasity, Melinda and I took our kids to deliver the gifts. It was such a wonderful feeling to give to this family in a meaningful way. Melinda helped bring together several families to do a good deed, and she included her children in the act of kindness. She took time to get to know about that family and to talk with them about what Alameda had to offer and invited them to join us at church. I don't know if they ever made it, but I feel certain that the time spent and the thought in the gifts touched that family more than we will know.

Just typing all this has given me an amazingly strong desire to call Melinda and chat. There is a part of me that always wondered if she would go back to nursing after the kids were in school. I am a family doc and thought she would be a great nurse to have! She was so excited for me when I started looking for a job closer to home and she encouraged me along the way. This was all during her diagnosis and treatment last year. When I finally found something close to home, she was so happy for me and encouraged me even more. I miss her. She has really inspired me to "get off the bench" as Rusty put it. I am a better person for having known her. There was a time when I was really dissatisfied with my job and shared with my life group that I was feeling kind of depressed. Melinda was a great listener. She then sent me a card out of the blue one day to encourage me. It was so sweet and really uplifted me. She had a great knack for knowing what I needed at different times. I am so thankful.

In April of this year I developed a mass in my neck. The ultrasound was inconclusive, and the radiologist suggested a biopsy to rule out lymphoma. I was pretty nervous. The first thought was, "My kids need their mom" and my second was, "How will I afford to fight cancer?" (Being the family breadwinner was not one of my incentives for choosing medicine!) Although I didn't tell many people, I needed to tell Melinda. I knew that she would pray for me, and I suppose I felt that she would know best what I really needed, as she had been through the biopsy phase before. And, she knew what was on the other side, and I needed her intersession, because I wasn't really sure how to pray. She hugged me and said, "Thank you for telling me. Let me know how it goes." She thanked me for sharing my burden. This was around her PET scan time, so she had already been through so much, and she still wanted to share my burden. Thankfully, it was only a thyroglossal duct cyst and not lymphoma. I chose not to have it removed, as it went down and I didn't want to have that surgery unless it was absolutely necessary. Melinda was even great about that, not making me feel petty or spoiled that I could chose whether or not to have a surgery that altered my appearance and put me out of commission for a couple of weeks. She had no choice about a sensitive appearance-altering surgery and the major inconvenience of chemo and radiation. What grace!

Thanks for this outlet. I hope that these are helpful in the story-gathering endeavor and can be used to help form the picture of who Mommy is to Marli, Marcus and Manning as they grow.

Misty Hsieh